|
Tour de Farce - Six May 2007
By Peter Sullivan
FROM the top of Spain it is all downhill. At the bottom it is a series of endless uphills, one after the other, all endless.
In the middle lies Madrid, where the food and wine are wonderful, and hills don’t matter because cycles are put away for a grateful few days’ grace for sore bums.
So Spain seemed in summary for us, the six foolish cyclists of James Clarke’s Tour de Farce, as we completed its sixth mission.
This year we allegedly went in search of the perfect paella. Instead we found museums, palaces, cathedrals, mosques, temples, art galleries, fantastic downhills, magical forests, delight-filled train paths, beautiful spring flowers everywhere, restaurants inspiring awe, a few mishaps and a splendid variety of drinks.
We started cycling at the snow-capped Pyrenees high in the north, and finally pedalled down to the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains which rise above Granada down south.
At the top of Spain our cycles were provided by a company called Sherpa with a note suggesting: “If we don’t see you for the next four days, it means you have had a good cycle.” And indeed it was so.
At the bottom of Spain our cycle providers, Cycling Through the Centuries, were with us constantly for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and all along the way. Thank heavens.
As I panted and pedalled up yet another steep and endless uphill from Cordoba en route to Baena, muscles aching, feet pushing furiously, bike crawling up the hill in lowest gear, I prayed some kind soul in a motor-driven contraption would pity me, fantasized they’d stop to offer me a lift, with my bike.
Going to school aged eight on my bike in the hot Free State sun 50 years ago I had those same fantasies. They never came true.
Lo and behold, the saints of Spain are more powerful.
Our ugly green support bus appeared around the corner. Martin the driver suggested I join my fellow cyclists – they were already inside the bus.
And so (to keep in with those saints) I must reveal we did not actually cycle all the way from the Pyrenees to the Sierra Nevada. We cheated. Not a little, a lot.
At the top of Spain we cycled for four days from Ripoll to Alot to Girona to Saint Feliu de Guixols, then took a bus to Barcelona. After sightseeing there for a few days, we took a train to Madrid, did tourist things there for a few days, then took a fast train to Cordoba, before cycling for four days to Grenada.
All in all, a fabulous trip.
Some hiccups in the fable: James Clarke put a pedal through his leg and needed five stitches; Harvey Tyson had ‘flu for a few days leaving him first hoarse then speechless; Alan Calenborne, our official photographer, cricked his fused spine so was forced to postpone riding one day; and James had his wallet lifted on Barcelona’s underground, a not uncommon occurrence.
Another mishap was missing our connecting flight from Madrid to Barcelona on the first day, so we had to take the next flight on Spanair. This introduced us to the quaint Spanish custom of exorbitant fees when you book a flight on-day. Our original flight was 40 Euros. The extra cost because we missed our connection was an additional 155 Euros each, about R1500. Guidebooks warn of this wicked practice. So don’t make tight flight connections in Spain, you will get screwed.
These were the minor hassles of a splendid 16 days. Spain is magical, so much to offer, so much to see, so much to do, so much to share.
Like the start of our trip, a magnificent downhill ride with the high Pyrenees behind us.
There is an old train track, now tarred or concreted, a path for cyclists and walkers, labeled La Ruta del Ferro (the iron route), in honour of the steam trains that used to puff along it. As trains struggle to go up or down steep hills, like unfit cyclists, the ride is serene, the gradients gradual. Even downhill you hardly notice that you are not pedalling.
You ride gently through forests and over streams “ like the Otter Trail but with bridges over the downsides” as Harvey Tyson encapsulated it. Effortless, marvellous.
At the verge each side of your handlebars spring flowers bloom, buttercups and bright yellow broom, pale purple flowers we could not identify, thistles with strong purple heads, blue flowers, white daisies and red, red poppies everywhere.
Little green cycles on the road at each turn show the way, and with our own illustrated maps, it was impossible to get lost.
So of course we did, several times. Once we had a good excuse. The restaurateur whose advice we sought said with a broad smile and some swift Spanish that our path had been dug up, vamoosed, to make way for a new water pipe.
Other times we were just foolish, looking at cuckoos in the woods instead of where we were going. Flocks of swallows, swifts, house martins, warblers, magpies and raptors swooped and dived into the insect life abundant on the flowers next to us.
Unlike Italy, Spain does not shoot its birds. Wetlands of great ornithological significance are everywhere. The spanish are aware of their ecology. Conservation enjoys a high priority, although as always more could be done. Tourism is a priority in Spain and done extraordinarily well. One secret of its success (over 55 million tourists a year, second only to France) is that it treats journalists well, so wherever we went we were royally entertained, wined, dined, guided, plastered with pamphlets and CDs. Given museum passes, train tickets, free tourist bus facilities – the hospitality almost too much. We loved it.
I could write an article just on our visit to Madrid’s Prado art museum, guided by the enthusiastic and knowledgeable Rosa, who showed us in just two hours the wonders of Tintoretto, Goya, Velasquez, El Greco, Hieronymus Bosch, then Picasso and Dali in the museum across the road.
Each painting came alive as she revealed hidden secrets, historical importance, mathematical accuracies and general magnificence.
Our many restaurant visits each deserve their own page, from the highly upmarket, pretentious and shockingly expensive La Broche to the opera-singing waiters of La Favorita, probably our favourite, and the roast piglets of restaurant Botin, billed as the oldest continuous restaurant not only in Spain but in the world.
Choosing one only, back to La Broche, to which we were taken by Spain’s Director of Tourism for Emerging Markets and his deputy.
Because our hotel neglected to give us letters left for us, our hosts waited at the restaurant, until they rang my cell --just as we were ordering an ordinary tourist meal at a small tourist cafe.
Warning them we were inappropriately dressed for decent dining, but aware they had waited an hour, we scurried into taxis and across town.
The restaurant is all white, white walls with no paintings, waiters in black. A white porcelain holder, like an upright double-CD holder is before you. Inside is the menu.
The cheap starter, “Smoked tuna and cod as a Xatonada salad” is 20 euros (about R200). More expensive is “Red prawn from Palamos, poached egg, fresh cheese and baby octopus sandwich” at 47 Euros (R470).
Service is impeccable, our hosts gracious, informative, as apologetic about the mix-up as we were, generous to a fault with superb wines.
A bruschetta, not on the menu, appeared as eggcups filled with coloured salts. Take some red salt, put in on a piece of toast the size of a large coin, add some olive oil, and it tastes in the mouth like strawberries on toast. Exquisite. Each dish an oil painting.
The Granny Smith apple which accompanied my “Smoked beef T-bone steak, morels salad, Granny Smith apple puree and ancient mustard” came as a foam. Strange. Weird even. The steak itself four folds of thinly cut meat atop each other in a tower separated by a sauce, about the size of a business card. One course has ten tiny white towers no bigger than matchsticks. Cream? Mayonnaise?
We obviously enjoyed ourselves as we left the restaurant about 1.30 am, filled with bonhomie, by now oblivious to the incongruity of our golf shirts and jeans in one of Spain’s most elegant restaurants.
Thinking of our eclectic tour, readers should be told of the famous palaces and mosques and monuments, from the Picasso Museum to the famed Alhambra in Granada. Yet my abiding memory is of us being guided through Cordoba’s Great Mezquita, dates dropping from the guide’s recital while my cell kept vibrating to update us on the Bulls vs Crusaders score.
The mosque, and the cathedral in the Mezquita’s middle, are amazing, wooden carvings for the choir took ten years to do, each seat intricate, high-backed, carved into Cuban mahogany. But you can buy a book or hit the internet and read about it in more detail than I could ever provide.
Then there are the patios of Cordoba, each beautifully planted with flower pots on the walls. An annual competition for the best patio carries a R36 000 prize. People queue to see them, they are private homes, each precious to see.
Grateful as we were to see these top sights of Spain, and they are stunning, our Tour de Farce is more about riding through forests and rural villages, enjoying each other’s company, drinking wine and sampling the local lunch.
I haven’t even mentioned the hotels, some good, some grand, some ordinary and many extraordinary. Some are hostals, some are parts of a global chain, some are inns.
“Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the shredding
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Under the vine of the dark veranda)?”
We are the muleteers of which Hilaire Belloc wrote.
At night we sneak a drink of our own tipple in one of our hotel rooms to avoid paying bar prices, and there we tell tall tales of journalism and editing.
We hear of famous telexes sent – I heard a new one this trip, which said eloquently “UPSTICK JOB ARSEWARDS” (telexes only had capital letters and no punctuation). Another replied to a news editor’s query “HOW OLD WELENSKY” by sending back “OLD WELENSKY FINE HOW YOU”. Or we laugh at remembered mispronunciations on radio, like “Mozart in a flat” or the business news reader inserting an Afrikaans word “Malaysia woes as currency falls.”
We argue about the state of the world, freely dispense advice to presidents on how to run their countries, talk of Bush and Blair and wish they would just listen to our sage advice so the planet could be fine again.
That is the essence of our Tour de Farce VI, six of us, ranging in age from Harvey Tyson’s 78 to my rather youthful 58. Richard Steyn is our finest cyclist, and because Rex Gibson had pneumonia we had a new member in Jimmy Mould, who worked for the Argus Group when Moses first printed his tablets. Alan our photographer and James our leader complete the six.
This year we had a cap to award, the Cape Epic cap, for whatever took our fancy. Mould won it once for helpfully giving our art graduate guide a newspaper cutting of Guernica, concerned that she might not know the painting.
So as we cycle uphill, panting, we think of how foolish we are to be doing this tough physical thing. As we whizz down hills, some so steep we fly far too fast to smell the lavender or white wild parsley, even the icy wind cutting through our clothes cannot chill our exhilaration.
Eventually the thrill of the downhill turns into a desire for warmth, perhaps with some medicinal brandy, taken in the company of friends. We grin like naughty schoolboys. Like naughty schoolboys, we are the happiest of creatures.
|
